PRESS BRIEFING ON ARRANGEMENTS FOR ELECTION IN EAST TIMOR

Press Briefing

PRESS BRIEFING ON ARRANGEMENTS FOR ELECTION IN EAST TIMOR

The total number of voter's registered in East Timor had largely exceeded expectations, Carina Perelli, Director of the Electoral Assistance Division in the United Nations Department of Political Affairs, said at a Headquarters press briefing this afternoon.

Ms. Perelli recently returned from the area. Her Division has been organizing and designing the electoral process in East Timor. She said the mandate was to organize and conduct a popular consultation in East Timor on the basis of a direct, secret and universal ballot in order to ascertain whether the East Timorese people would accept or reject the proposed autonomy described in the 5 May agreements.

The registration was completed on 6 August in 200 registration centres on East Timor, and on 8 August in the external registration centres. "We were extremely encouraged by the turnout", Ms. Perelli said. The total number of 451,792 registered voters exceeded by far not only United Nations expectations, but the expectations of most of the observers of the East Timor question as well.

Before the 30 August election a certain number of processes and tasks still had to be completed, she said. The hearings and appeals regarding rejections had already been completed, on 7 August inside East Timor and 9 August for the external voting. On 17 August, the Electoral Commission, after revising 119 appeals, was concluding the adjudication of appeals.

Ms. Perelli said they were finalizing publication of the lists that had to be redistributed to registration centres, so that they could be exhibited and the registered voters could start challenging the lists. The electoral commission would hear those challenges from 20 to 28 August.

On 14 August the period of campaigning was opened in a public ceremony. "We were extremely encouraged", she said, "because not only a code of conduct for the campaign was established, but also regional campaign committees chaired by the regional electoral coordinator in each region with representatives of both sides".

District campaign committees had also been established in 5 of the 13 districts, and would be in other districts. Ms. Perelli said this was important because through these committees dates and sites of campaign events could be agreed upon. This had the potential of averting trouble and establishing consensus regarding compliance with the code of conduct for the campaign.

This was one of the periods where the electoral commission appointed by the Secretary-General had one of the most prominent goals, according to Ms. Perelli. Three eminent personalities -- Judge Johann Christiaan Kriegler from South Africa, Dr. Bong-Scuk Sohn from South Korea and Patrick Bradley from Northern Ireland -- sat in that commission. They had been hearing the challenges in the different regions in public hearings and playing the role of "supreme electoral tribunal". Now they would be a "watchdog body" that would monitor United Nations actions and compliance with the procedures and rules that had been set up.

A code of conduct for observers had also been agreed upon. No distinction between international and local observers was made, Ms. Perelli explained. As of 16 August, 1,371 observers had been officially credited, plus 50 Indonesian and 50 Portuguese official observers. Some governments had been sending delegations; Ireland, representing the European Union, Australia, Chile, New Zealand and the European Commission. Four hundred observers represented international organizations. The remainder were local bodies.

"We are extremely encouraged by the fact that registration has gone so well, and that the process, despite security incidents, has been progressing in a manner that lets us expect that there will be no major upheaval during the consultation itself", said Ms. Perelli. They had had to deal with some special cases, like displaced population that had to be registered, and prisoners disenfranchised inside prisons, but that task had been completed.

After the consultation, the phase of counting the votes would be entered. At this moment, she said, the date of the announcement of the results could not be ascertained. However, it was important to note that the vote would be counted centrally and that there would be no breakdown in terms of regional or external/internal votes. There would be no possibility to identify single villages during the count.

Asked how the counting of votes would work, Ms. Perelli explained that once the polls were closed, the ballot boxes and the electoral forms, plus the sensitive materials that had not been used, would be transported to the regional centres. At the regional centre level a first reconciliation would be done, basically making sure that every ballot box had been received. But the boxes would not be opened. There also would be a check that there had been no tampering during the transport. From there they would be transported to a centrally located warehouse in Dili, where teams of counters of 2 people each were waiting. After "logging-in" the ballot boxes, all identifying marks would be stripped and the boxes would be mixed, so that once the boxes reached the counting tables nobody would know where the boxes came from.

"I am a lot more optimistic than I could have been a month ago", she said, replying to a question about possible tampering during the counting process. There had been a significant decrease in the number of serious incidents, as well as in the quality of the response by the authorities, particularly by the Indonesian police. Nobody could predict exactly what would happen on voting day, but they had been assured during the senior officials' meeting that Jakarta had a policy of no tolerance for incidents.

She said that if anybody wanted to know anything about codes of conduct or the rules regarding the election, they could be found in the United Nations Assistance Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) website: www.unamet.org.

Asked if she could share some of the difficulties she had encountered, Ms. Perelli said that from the beginning a big enemy to contend with was fear and the potential for intimidation. Procedures had been created to allow voters the mobility to register in a different place than their place of residence. But there had also been the question of displaced populations. Since there had been no survey of the number of internally displaced persons, contingency plans had to be made. This had been done by establishing geographical priorities and shifting UNAMET staff from one place to the next. This had resulted in a request for an extra 50 staff.

A second difficulty had been making people understand that the United Nations role was not fostering one option or the other, but to make sure that all East Timorese voices could be heard. Time restraints had also caused extra difficulties. A normal process would take 12 to 18 months. This one had been done in less than 4 months. The secret to this success had been the deployment of what she called a "dream team for elections".

If the leader of the anti-autonomy faction, Xanana Gusmao, was still under arrest in Jakarta, how could this election be democratic? a correspondent asked. Ms. Perelli answered that Mr. Gusmao had been a party to many of the conversations and many of the actions. One could say that conditions had not been ideal, but she sensed that the East Timorese wanted this consultation, even though things could be better. She noted a quotation of her grandmother that "the best is sometimes the enemy of the good".

The computerized voters' list was a key element in preventing fraud such as ballot-stuffing, with sufficient safeguards in terms of tests of the data, she said, answering a question about voter fraud on a local level. Apart from that there would be sufficient supervision, from staff, from international observers and from the electoral commissioners to prevent collusion between parties who want to commit fraud and poll workers.

The votes from the external voting centres would first be transmitted in code, Ms. Perelli said, because they did not want to delay the results of the votes, waiting for the physical ballots to arrive. But the difference between internal and external results would not be announced. After the consultation, there would be no way to determine geographical differences. Except for academic studies, there was no political or technical reason for that sort of breakdown.

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